Military battlefield apparatus is desirably provided with what may be considered a finely tuned combination of reliability, physical damage immunity and operating ease. The United States Armed Forces have for example maintained since at least an early part of the twentieth century a set of standards intended to bring as many of these characteristics as possible into each new piece of hardware placed in their inventory. These MIL standards often state specific physical and characteristics requirements to be met by common items entering the U.S. military supply system. Common examples bearing the influence of such standards include the clothing, the vehicles and the weaponry used by the U.S. Military.
Notwithstanding the influence of these MIL standards and commendable early planning for most new military apparatus it is often found desirable as a result of cost considerations and the desirable performance of an existing piece of military equipment for examples to accomplish modifications of existing equipment in order to meet new needs or to take advantage of new technology or to otherwise improve its performance beyond that envisioned by the early planners. The well-known B-52 bomber aircraft is a notable large equipment example of such upgrading and continued usage. When this aircraft was first conceived in the 1940's and 1950's such things as global position systems, satellite communications and even integrated circuit electronics were hardly a thought in anyone's mind yet the retrofitting such technologies into older equipment including the B-52 has become commonplace and provides valuable systems for present day uses. The present invention is concerned with another of these retrofitting sequences involving a less spectacular but nevertheless essential piece of military hardware i.e., the communications equipment used by certain arms of several of the U.S. military services.
To be more specific, in the world of special operations forces there can arise a need for persons operating in secrecy and perhaps behind enemy lines to communicate under a number of unfavorable conditions with a plurality of different persons. These communications may extend in distance for example from the crew of a nearby aircraft to a distant command center or to special operations companions located significant distances away. A portion of such communications may for example involve satellites and high gain highly directive antennas while other portions may involve more simple local area antennas having omni directional field patterns. Since such communications are often needed under conditions of utmost secrecy, in darkness or otherwise obstructed visibility, with significant second party flexibility and under conditions of great haste the ability to switch antennas used for such communications with minimum lost communication time can be important. The need for haste can be appreciated for example by considering a scenario wherein last second events require the abortion or redirection of an embarked-upon air strike mission. The antennas used for these several communications tasks may be differently configured in that they have differing directional orientations, different electrical field patterns, different mounting arrangements, different physical size and shape, differing operating frequencies, and so-on.
By way of special interest, a version of the present invention including the transceiver radio set, the monopole and beam antennas and the antenna switch element is said to have appeared in the Fox news channel coverage of the 2003 Coalition Forces movement toward Baghdad, Iraq. Deployment of the invention to the battlefield has in fact received high priority in the U.S. Department of Defense.